British street style before the age of the selfie

The blog What We Wore collects old pictures of people snapped wearing their trendiest gear. As a book is published of its best submissions, we remember the days before technology changed fashion and photography for ever

Before I meet Nina Manandhar, the founder of the blog What We Wore, I’m determined to dig out a picture of myself as a teenager, so she might add an image of my own highly flammable hairstyle to her growing archive of street style. Only then I remember: no such image exists. That miraculous moment when my carefully constructed look – the frosted lips and the shimmering eyelids, the scratchy winklepickers and the ankle-flapping duster coat – finally came together was never going to be captured for posterity in my case. Even if any of my friends had owned a camera, they were hardly going to lug it with them to Barry Noble’s Roxy Nite Spot.

Manandhar, a Shoreditch-based photographer, laughs. This isn’t the first time she’s heard a story like this. In the days before camera phones, photographs were relatively rare: film was expensive, flashbulbs unreliable. Plus, people seemed to live for the moment, rather than for the moment when they could stick the moment on Instagram. “Selfies are such a part of our lives now,” she says. “It’s as if we feel we don’t exist unless we’re constantly documenting ourselves. But go back a bit and it gets harder and harder to find pictures of street style. People will often say, ‘I didn’t think about getting my photo taken; I was too busy enjoying myself.’”

The images she has gathered in the two years since she established What We Wore – they cover the period 1950 to 2000 – are, then, both precious and touching. They are precious because they’re not the kind of thing you see every day. They are touching because, before digital, we had to take people as they came, the pose not always being just so.

Manandhar’s new book of the blog, a kind of greatest hits, reminds the reader how pragmatic and cobbled together street fashion used to be. Turning its pages leaves you feeling wistful and nostalgic. Brands were not yet dominant; the statement handbag, whether real or knockoff, was still far in the future; the insidious link between celebrity and fashion was not yet fully established; the only people whose style we wanted to ape were pop stars, and not a single one the product of a TV talent show; Primark and Zara, so cheap and ridiculously speedy, did not yet exist.

“There used to be an element of quest involved in style,” she says. “You had to really go out and find the things you wanted.” Manandhar is 33. Her appearance as a teenager, part goth and part punk, owed a lot to London’s long-dismantled Kensington Market and was about both difference and belonging. She and her friends hated the idea of looking like everyone else, but wanted to look the same as each other.

For a few moments, we leaf through the book in search of our favourite pictures (What We Wore relies on submissions from the public, which always rise after Christmas, when people go home and raid their parents’ attics). I’m drawn to a photograph of Jerina Philips, a retired PA, taken in Birmingham in 1975, who is showing off her flares as wide as sails. It’s impossible not to smile at the exuberant kick she’s performing for the camera.

Manandhar picks out a photograph from 1983 of an artist, Paul Dyson, who was then deeply into Tik and Tok, the robotic mime duo. It’s the inadvertent contrast between his Steve Strange makeup and the shiny Formica of his parents’ kitchen that she cherishes, the one so earnestly futuristic, the other so irredeemably homely.

But look more closely. Perhaps this wasn’t unintentional. Perhaps Dyson chose this backdrop quite deliberately. It’s an undeniable fact that next to his mother’s flowery tiles and cluttered cupboard tops, his carefully shaded cheekbones look all the sharper, his painted lips all the more startlingly black.